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A theater enters from the underground

MOSCOW — The Free Theater of Belarus, not yet a year old, has no home, no permanent troupe and, for now, only three short plays in its repertory. It staged them for a while in a cramped bar called Graffiti in an industrial neighborhood of Minsk, the Belarussian capital, but the authorities warned the bar's owner to stop.

The theater now performs in private apartments and in places that are not openly advertised - and, increasingly, abroad, where it is drawing international attention and support from prominent playwrights, including Tom Stoppard and Vaclav Havel.

"Hello, we came from Minsk," one of the theater's producers, Nikolai Khalezin, said in late January, introducing the company at its Russian debut, two nights of performances at the Meyerhold Center here. Khalezin's opening remark drew knowing laughter and applause, because even in Russia, where the Kremlin under President Vladimir Putin has tightened political control, Belarus is ridiculed as an oppressive, backward place.

That country's president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, has stifled not only politics and private business, but also the arts. The cultural authorities have increasingly treated unconventional, let alone experimental, theater as a form of subversion.

More than 14 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its rigid system of imposing ideological conformity across Central and Eastern Europe, the Free Theater has emerged as a new artistic underground, not unlike the Russian artists who displayed their paintings in private apartments in the 1960s and '70s, or the playwrights, like Havel, who worked furtively in communist Czechoslovakia.

"Our main focus is theater that reacts to today's events," Vladimir Shcherban, a director of the Free Theater, said in an interview in Minsk in January. "It speaks the language of our time." Shcherban's productions have been banned at the state-controlled theater where he works.

The plays are not overtly political. The company's first production was a Russian translation of "4:48 Psychosis," a wrenching internal dialogue of depression and suicide by the British playwright Sarah Kane. The second, "Breathing Techniques" by the Russian writer Natalya Moshina, is a tragicomic story of a young woman dying in a cancer ward.

The subtexts, though, are unmistakable in Belarus, a place where public debate - in newspapers, on television - is practically nonexistent. The third play, "We. Self-Identification," by three Belarussian playwrights, weaves episodes exploring death, marriage and freedom with sections of profane dialogue recorded at the construction site of the new National Library in Minsk, a project that has been criticized as a grandiose Lukashenko folly.

"What the hell do I need this library for?" one actor says during a rapid-fire exchange of workplace banter. "I don't remember the last time I read a book."

The Free Theater took root last year as a drama competition organized by Khalezin and his wife, Nataliya Koliada, both playwrights, who hoped to cultivate Belarussian writers. It evolved into a workshop and then a production company, though, given the circumstances, a loosely organized one.

"The Belarussian renaissance lasted from 1991 to 1994," Khalezin said in an interview in Minsk, in the bar where the troupe first staged its plays. "It was a very powerful discharge of energy. Belarus today is a boiler, with the lid screwed tightly shut."

Stoppard, who traveled to Czechoslovakia during communist times, went to Belarus last year and conducted his own workshop in a village outside of Minsk. He wrote about the experience in The Guardian of London and has since become the Free Theater's patron.

"On the one hand, it makes life very difficult for them," Stoppard said in a telephone interview, referring to the government's repressive control, which has included warnings from state theater managers and the secret police. "On the other hand - and this isn't a recommendation for being a suppressed writer - in their situation now, as with Havel and his friends in the '70s and '80s, the consolation is that your work matters."